David Heath: I am very tempted to pursue the hon. Gentleman's logic, but I have to say that I have had extremely helpful conversations with some of the energy companies over the past week, and I feel that I should put on record their support for elements of my Bill. I am a bit worried about alienating them too much at this stage, because I need their assistance to make the Bill work. Nevertheless, as the hon. Gentleman knows, the fact that bills rose, but have not fallen at the same rate is a real issue. This appears to be an over-bloated industry, and that gives many of our constituents cause for concern.

Lorely Burt: I am delighted that my hon. Friend is presenting this Bill. The hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle) pointed out that fuel poverty affects rural and urban areas alike. I was shocked to discover that more than 15 per cent. of people are in fuel poverty in Solihull, which is hardly renowned for being one of the poorer parts of the country. That shows how pervasive the problem is throughout the United Kingdom.

David Heath: I must make progress but I am happy to take interventions at this stage.

Mark Hunter: I add my personal congratulations on the service that my hon. Friend has done all of us by introducing the Bill, which as we have heard from other hon. Members, would help constituents up and down the land. Does he not agree that there is a real urgency for the Bill to be introduced precisely because the Government have already admitted that they are not going to reach their existing targets? They have already effectively conceded that the targets for dealing with fuel poverty and vulnerable households by 2010 are not going to be reached. Does he agree that it is therefore even more difficult to understand the lack of support that is apparently coming from those on the Government Front Bench?

Sandra Gidley: I too welcome the Bill, but is my hon. Friend aware of the briefing from the Energy Retail Association? He has been very kind about some of the energy retailers, but was he as concerned as I was to read that they are saying:
	"There are dangers that putting a customer on a social tariff could undermine the benefits of a competitive market"?
	He may have an opinion on that. I do not necessarily subscribe to their view—I want to make that clear. He may recall that, a few years ago, tariffs designed to help old people were introduced at a very low rate and then there were swingeing increases year on year. People were trapped in the system. Does he trust the energy companies to deliver on this?

David Heath: Not many.
	This is what the Bill does. It offers a strategy to eliminate fuel poverty by 2016, to treat homes with lasting and sustainable improvements and, in the interim, to introduce a statutory social tariff.
	I cannot believe, and a lot of Members here today find it difficult to believe, that in this so-called civilised country that is affluent even in modern circumstances, we can allow 3.5 million households at a conservative estimate—the figure is probably 5 million—to be in fuel poverty. It is a disgrace. I think that all sides recognise that that is a disgrace, so we are talking about how to deal with that issue.
	It cannot be right that one in three older people live in one room over winter to keep warm. It cannot be right that one quarter of all older people stay in bed to keep warm. It cannot be right that one in 10 older people in this country cut back on essentials such as food and clothes to pay fuel bills because they cannot do both. That is a national disgrace and it is one that we need to address. It cannot be right also that every year people die because of the cold in this relatively temperate country of ours. The Government's own Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs figures from 2004 show that, each year in the United Kingdom, there are between 25,000 and 45,000 excess winter deaths—that is the clinical and unexpressive term that is used. That does not happen elsewhere; it does not happen in much colder countries than ours, such as Norway, Sweden or the other Scandinavian nations. They have severe winters, but they keep their citizens warm in their homes. We fail, and we as a House are responsible for the fact that that is happening. Also of course, for every person who dies from a cold-related death, many more are made ill or put in hospital as a result.
	Given that we all identify climate change as the biggest and most urgent issue we face, it cannot be right that so many homes in our country leak energy—energy is wasted simply because the houses are not up to the necessary standard. If my Bill were implemented and the houses that we have identified as being lived in by people in fuel poverty were brought up to standard, their carbon emissions would be reduced by 59 per cent. Should that not be a priority for the House and the Government? If we are going to make a real difference on climate change, we must start with domestic households and stop wasting energy. Of course, that would reduce costs as well—not only costs to the individual, but costs to the state in providing support. It therefore makes sense to do something about such a loss of energy.
	I have touched on the fact that this is a rural issue as well as an urban issue. Indeed, I have stressed the rural dimension, but I do not want Members who represent city constituencies to feel that I have left them out. We have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt); I think I would describe her seat as a suburb constituency, but perhaps that is a dangerous thing to say.  [Interruption.] There are perfectly nice and very pleasant suburbs; suburbs are good—country is better, but suburbs are good. My point, however, is that this is an issue for the entire nation.
	Let me reiterate the economic dimension. It makes sense to create green jobs. I thought the Government wanted to do that. I thought they said that one of their initiatives to beat the recession was to stimulate areas of the economy that were going to produce sustainable work for the future. That must start with those jobs that provide an environmental benefit. There is huge scope here, as a lot of individuals will be involved.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) has been very patient, so I shall now invite her to intervene.

David Heath: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is one of the tragedies at the moment that some of our poorest constituents end up paying the most for their fuel. They do so via tariff systems, and prepayment meters are part of that. I do not think, however, that we can draw an easy equation between those buildings with prepaid meters and the people who are poor. It is not as simple as that. It is true that a lot of people who are in poverty have prepaid meters, but many people who are not in poverty have prepaid meters, particularly in London where many private sector landlords install them as a matter of course. Often yuppies who work in the City live happily in those flats—perhaps we should call them the new poor, but I do not think they are poor yet. The equation is, therefore, not quite that simple, but my hon. Friend is right that this issue needs to be addressed as part of the social tariff arrangements.
	The Government are discussing social tariffs with the Ofgem-regulated electricity and gas companies, but, as the hon. Member for Ynys Môn said, a lot of people in this country do not heat their houses with gas or electricity—gas because they cannot get it, and electricity because that is not the way they have traditionally heated their home. They rely on liquefied petroleum gas, fuel oil or solid fuel, and those fuel sources have increased in price the most over recent years. People who rely on them are now having the greatest difficulty in paying their bills. I should declare an interest here: my rural hovel relies on fuel oil and the bill has gone up enormously this year compared with last year. I can just about pay the bill, but I recognise that others will be in great difficulty.
	There is a permissive element within the social tariff part of the Bill that permits the Government to bring other fuel sectors into the equation if they can— although I am not sure if it is possible. I would not necessarily want those sectors to be brought within the Ofgem bureaucracy, because that may result in more regulation than is required, but if we can find a way of extending the social tariff to non Ofgem-regulated fuel sources, that would be of great benefit.

Alan Beith: I am glad my hon. Friend has mentioned the people who are not on the gas network and who rely on Calor gas as their only means of heating, because that is an even more uncompetitive market than the oil market. It involves a commitment to a tank, which effectively determines which supplier they are going to use. I hope that he will continue to stress, therefore, that there is a series of reasons why many people in rural areas are more likely to be fuel-poor, and that is one of them.

Alan Reid: I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing the Bill. I want to emphasise the point made by the two previous party colleagues who have spoken. In large rural constituencies such as mine, many houses are well outwith the 2 km distance from the gas network that my hon. Friend referred to earlier. There is no possibility of those properties ever getting gas, and they are reliant on a variety of other sources, such as oil, Calor gas and solid fuel. I hope the Bill gets its Second Reading today and that when it reaches its Committee stage, we can explore ways of bringing these types of heating systems within regulatory networks, so that they too can benefit from regulation. Last year's spike in oil prices is causing severe problems for people with these types of heating systems.

David Heath: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. Opinions differ—suppliers are not all united—on this; some think that the packages pose a potential difficulty in terms of their competitive structure, whereas others are worried that the social tariff that they have introduced provides for a better deal than is likely to emerge in a universal concept. There are many discussions still to be had, but I know that Ministers are having such discussions at the moment and are committed to making progress. It would be wrong for me to prescribe in a private Member's Bill anything that would cut across current work, and I have stressed that throughout in my discussions with everybody on this. My Bill is essentially a permissive one—it would put a duty on the Secretary of State to provide the strategy and it would permit the Secretary of State to bring in a statutory social tariff, but the elements making up that strategy and tariff would be left to the Secretary of State. I make no apologies for that, because this is a highly technical issue and the last thing I want to do is torpedo work that is in progress, but I want to focus that work in the right direction—the one that I think will achieve the best results.

David Heath: It is very noticeable that the SNP Members are not here today. I would have thought this matter ought to have interested them, and it is noticeable that Members from all the other parties, who have interests in all parts of the United Kingdom, are here—I shall leave it at that.

Geoffrey Cox: I congratulate the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) on introducing the Bill and support its general tenor.
	I shall make a few succinct points, which I hope the Minister will take into account. I have the honour to sit on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee which, as she knows, is concluding its inquiry on fuel poverty. We have heard evidence, both written and oral, from a wide range of sources. My plea to the Minister and my hope for the Bill is that it will inculcate and engender a greater sense of coherence and focus in the various and often laudable measures being taken by the Government to combat fuel poverty.
	I am aware that in the Chamber today there may be a disproportionate number, at least among those who originally attended the debate, from rural constituencies, and I am one of that number. Representing a rural area, one cannot fail to become conscious of the great amount of the housing stock that does not fulfil any reasonable specification for energy efficiency. That, as other Members have commented, is because the houses are often old and rubble-built, with solid walls, and are often in remote and isolated places.
	In representing my constituency, it has occasionally been my sadness to come across some extreme cases of fuel poverty, in which I have done my best, as any constituency MP would do, to resolve them. As the Minister knows, the main instrument of the Government's targeting of those who are fuel poor is the excellent Warm Front initiative. She knows what I am about to say because she has heard it before while she appeared before the Select Committee. I do not know what is happening in urban areas, but there is a serious flaw in the Warm Front initiative, at least in relation to a proportion of those who take up the scheme.
	In 2007-08 some 20,400 households, although they had advanced towards taking up the scheme, did not in the end take it up. More than 6,000 households withdrew from it, and nearly 15,000 households did not progress it. In its report last month, as the hon. Lady knows, the National Audit Office commented on those 20,000 households. It is important to compare that to the fact that 129,000 households did take up the scheme in 2007-08, but 20,000 households is a worrying proportion, as I hope she will agree. The National Audit Office suggested that among those households must be a sizeable proportion that did not take it up because of the top-up payments that the grant still requires.
	The top-up payments seem to be disproportionately impacting people in rural areas largely because, if I may hazard a guess, people in rural areas are separated from the gas main and therefore have to install oil boilers. There is no doubt, and again the NAO commented on this subject, that when oil-fired heating is installed, eaga is at the higher end of the scale—that is, the least competitive end of the scale—for the installation of that kind of equipment. So in the rural part of Devonshire that I represent, Torridge and West Devon, people come from great distances to install the equipment, the equipment itself is at the higher end of the scale in terms of competitive price for eaga, and households have to stump up large top-ups.
	Mrs. Yvonne Smalldon in Buckland Brewer has waited longer than two years simply to be able to take a shower in her house in that village. She would visit her sister several miles away. She has shivered in the cold and sometimes in anxiety and fear at the prospect of another winter. Because a number of charities rallied round, including Torridge council, to help her with the top-up, she has, I am glad to say, been able to install her oil boiler. She is now able to run hot water, have a bath and feel warm in her home. That has been achieved only because of the charitable help and the extraordinary efforts of many people to scramble round and raise that top-up. Before those people could manage that, Mrs. Smalldon waited two and a half years in those uncivilised and primitive conditions.

Geoffrey Cox: I am grateful to the Minister for those assurances, but many voices have been warning the Government for a number of years about how a worryingly large percentage of people in a specific category are being denied access to this generally successful and laudable scheme. I am pleased that the Government are taking the issue forward, but I am going to make a number of other constructive criticisms of the fragmented approach taken towards the relief of fuel poverty.
	I support the Bill because I hope that it will engender a clarity and coherence that we do not yet see in how the Government are taking forward their policy. I shall leave the Warm Front scheme, because the Minister has got the point: there is no doubt that the scheme has a flaw, and Members on both sides of the House have commented on it. I urge the Minister to allow the Bill to go through because it might considerably focus and sharpen attention across the House on that important problem.
	Let me give the Minister another example of why I say to her that the root-and-branch review is so badly needed and that we have waited for coherence for far too long. Take winter fuel payments; I expect that the Minister also knows what I am going to say about them. Last year, winter fuel payments cost the Government £2.7 billion, yet only 12 per cent. of those to whom the payments were made were in fuel poverty. Why on earth should I, or any relatively affluent Member of the House—who had reached the requisite other qualification, I hasten to add—enjoy the benefit of a winter fuel payment? I am thinking particularly of people on higher-rate tax bands. It makes no sense. One thing that the Government could do quickly—and I urge them to do it—would be to remove winter fuel payments from those on higher tax bands. There would be no injustice in that, and it would free up about £250 million a year. That money could be applied to the very causes that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome is bringing his Bill forward to promote.

Fiona Mactaggart: They are not identical, but there is a relatively easy fix and we should take it. That situation is a classic example of the poverty premium. I am furious about the fact that my poorest constituents are likely to pay three times as much for a washing machine as me, simply because of the way in which they have to get credit. I am furious about the fact that my constituents who are forced on to prepayment meters because of past debts pay more than I do for fuel. Indeed, some of them are further pushed into debt by fuel companies because the companies do not recalibrate the meters in time. I welcome the fact that Ofgem has taken action on that, but it has not take action on the fundamental pricing issue.
	The poorest people sometimes want a prepayment meter. As a client of Barnardo's—a young mother in Wales—rather tellingly pointed out:
	"I had the token meter put in because it's easier and you know where you are. The only way to get a meter is to get in debt with the suppliers—otherwise you pay £80."
	People in debt, who find it hardest to pay, are overwhelmingly on prepayment meters. Not long ago, the charity National Energy Action produced figures showing that the number of prepayment meters installed in households by energy companies to recover debt has increased by 19 per cent. for electricity and by 6 per cent. for gas in the past year. According to Transact, which is a consortium of debt advice agencies, housing associations and credit unions, prepayment customers are charged on average £215—£215: let us compare that to the winter fuel payment—more for their energy than people paying by direct debit, as I do.
	The problem is fixable now. It would not be hard for Ofgem to require all energy suppliers to set the prepayment meter tariff at their lowest tariff. I do not say what the tariff should be, but it should be the same as the supplier's lowest tariff. It would cost them. One way they could recover the cost might be by creating new charging mechanisms for people who want to install prepayment meters in flats. Ofgem might be able to negotiate such a scheme with landlords who want to organise their flats in that way. In a country led by a Government who are committed to eradicating poverty and who have made real progress on child poverty, even though we are not likely to meet our target, I seriously think we should take that simple straightforward step to eliminate fuel poverty right now before the Bill comes in—if it is ever passed.
	Secondly, I want to look at targets. As we know, the High Court has decided on duties and so on, but I am quite anxious about the way that we create for Governments legally binding duties that do not legally bind. I am concerned that the Bill might be following a tradition that I am quite prepared to say my Government are to some extent responsible for starting; it is good for Governments to do such things but they do not seem to be effective in reality. We need to address that issue, because if we set ourselves legally binding targets that turn out not to be legally binding, and if we create ambitions for Government with no mechanism to hold them properly to account—in the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), to be properly justiciable—politics comes into disrepute. We are not really doing what it says on the tin. That is a potential risk in the structure of the Bill, and we should avoid it. As the Bill progresses, I should be interested in discussing more carefully how one can put legally binding duties on Governments and bring them into effect.
	I want briefly to make a couple of other points. Like the hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Cox), I am concerned about extreme cold weather payments, not because in Slough, which is a jolly small and rather condensed place, we have the problem he described of the temperature in one place being rather different from the temperature in the place where the measurement is made, but because of the attitude taken sometimes by the Pension Service.
	One of my constituents told me that he believed that someone down the road had received a cold weather payment while he had not. My assistant phoned the Pension Service, which assured him in terms, "No, Slough hasn't qualified this year." I thought that that was extremely unlikely, as I told my constituent, and it turned out that Slough had qualified on three occasions. My suspicion is that a civil servant at the Pension Service simply could not be bothered to check properly. I might be wrong—I might have slipped—but the question is how much we care. Given the importance of that payment for so many of the families whom we are talking about, we really need to make sure that those responsible for administering it deliver the policy properly, as I know the Minister understands.
	Finally, I want to praise Slough council for having a "photograph" that measures the energy emissions from every property in my constituency. We can go online and see how much of the air above our homes we are heating. In the middle of Slough, there is a combined heat and power station that shows up scarlet, because like any power station it inevitably emits huge amounts of energy, but it is possible to see the difference between houses in a road that have a high quality of insulation and those that do not. I have been able to use the site for people who say, "Oh, I don't want eaga to come mess with me." I can show them that the people next door are heating less of the air above their home, so I say, "Go for it; eaga will help", even though they say, "But I won't have any hot water for a day and a half." The site can help to encourage people to take the steps that are available. We can also make sure that the rest of us, who are not facing fuel poverty, realise how energy-efficient our homes are. That kind of information is powerful in the hands of the consumer, and consumers can use it to insulate their homes, if they can afford to do so.
	The strategy for reducing fuel poverty requires a number of different bits of action; I think that all of us accept that. The Bill emphasises work on homes, but before we get a complex fuel strategy, the first thing that we should do—I urge the Department of Energy and Climate Change to do this—is make sure that the regulator ensures that people on prepayment meters do not pay a premium for the terrible service that they receive, because that is very oppressive for them.

Stephen Pound: The Roman Catholic Church does not sell indulgences any more. However, I am always prepared to consider offers.
	The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome has raised a vital subject. At the outset, I hope that he will accept—as would everybody—that no Government in the history of this nation have ever done more to combat fuel poverty than this Government. It is interesting to note that none of us disagree with the main thrust of the Bill. Nobody is speaking up for fuel poverty, except perhaps for a few megalomaniac oligarchs somewhere in the outer reaches of the energy supply chain. We are all united. We simply slightly diverge on how best to achieve those ends.
	As a graduate of the London School of Economics, I am always reluctant to use statistics, but the single most chilling statistic—"chilling" is an appropriate word—that one could come across can be found in the official Library figures for the estimated number of households in fuel poverty in the UK. The figure plunged from 6.5 million in 1996 to 2 million in 2003 and 2004 and then started to rise again to 3.5 million in 2006. The reason for that was simple. Energy prices are the main driver of fuel poverty and we know that domestic prices for fuel fell by 17 per cent. in real terms between 1996 and 2003, but increased by 39 per cent. between 2003 and 2006. So, whatever we achieve with the Bill, and whatever the Government's policies work towards, there will always be the issue—the elephant in the rather chilly room—of fuel costs. They have already been mentioned, and we have to consider them.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson) takes a rather robust view of energy suppliers; I think it involves a measure of capital punishment. I cannot always disagree with him, although other people have suggested introducing windfall taxes. Whatever we do, we will have to consider the issue.
	Let us look at what we can do and what we have done, and at how the hon. Gentleman's Bill can help. Anyone who opposed the Bill would be in the same position as someone who had been photographed kicking a puppy. It is honestly meant, and it is here to help. Everyone is in favour of it; the question is merely how best we can achieve the aim. I do not wish to go into the costs involved, because I think that that subject will be ventilated elsewhere. We have discussed whether the figures involved related to the base figures, and we could discuss that for a long time. I think that there is an element of the Bill that remains uncosted.
	The hon. Gentleman was quite right to say that the Bill was aspirational, as well as a permissive. It is extremely important that he pointed that out. When he won his place in the ballot, I was surprised that he chose this subject for his Bill. He is known for his interest in constitutional matters of great moment. However, when the House heard him speak today about the reality of fuel poverty, we recognised the passion that flows through his veins and understood why he had chosen to promote this issue.

Andrew Dismore: The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) calls the Bill aspirational and permissive, and I do not think that anyone would object if that were the case. The real problem is that it not only aspirational and permissive; it is also mandatory. That is the issue that I tried to explore in an earlier intervention. The real difficulty would be that these measures would effectively have to take priority over all the Government's other priorities, without taking into account all the other things that the Government have to do.

Stephen Pound: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention; he normally charges for his wise words on a fairly expensive scale. On this occasion, he has raised an important point that I was going to mention later.
	What would happen if a Government target were not met? Would the Government have to resign? What would the sanction be? Would the chief executive be dismissed? Heaven forefend! I think that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome recognises that this is an issue. Targets are now—sadly, some would say—part of our culture and everyday life. They have a useful role in benchmarking.

Stephen Pound: We heard earlier that the temperature in Dartmoor was rather chilly. I hope that the windows would have not only bars but double glazing.
	In one of the many passages of great passion in the speech of the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, he referred to the contrast between the Scandinavian countries and ours in relation to heat poverty. However, only some northern European and Baltic countries meet the standard to which he referred. The fact that they do so is a result of more than 100 years of building regulations and, in the case of Sweden, at least 100 years of building regulations and practices that include the use of extremely sound insulation. The situation in some of the Baltic countries that do not meet those standards—I will not even mention Kaliningrad—is quite the opposite, however. I refer to countries where great chunks of mastic are missing from the joints of building systems and constructions and where the gas fires and paraffin heaters can be seen pumping heat out into the air. There is a genuine issue there of building construction, to which I hope to return in a few moments.
	As we know, the Government have spent more than £20 billion on fuel policies and programmes since 2000, and one of the most important is the winter fuel programme, which entered into our earlier discussion. I understand that winter fuel payments are contentious in one way: some people say that if winter fuel payments are increased, it simply increases the ability of the suppliers to ramp up the prices because they know they will be met. I shall not refer more than once to what I consider an extremely unfortunate statement from the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench team that the winter fuel payment was
	"a gimmick of a policy, and we should look at how much it is costing in bureaucracy."—[ Official Report, 18 January 1999; Vol. 323, c. 648.]
	I hope that the Liberal Democrats have resiled from that position and recognised that the winter fuel payment is not a gimmick; it is in many cases a lifesaver. More than 12 million people were kept warm last year by winter fuel payments. I entirely understand that some people who may be swimming in cash are actually receiving them, but the fact remains that an enormous number of people are heating their homes with the aid of the winter fuel payment.
	What sort of homes are they heating? For many years, I was a housing officer in Camden, where I received constant communication from the MP representing that area. One of the points that he made, which I then had to deal with, was that even if people had completely adequate heating, they might not use it properly or they might not allow for an element of ventilation or they might use clothes dryers in the kitchen, pumping water into the building, resulting in damp, condensation and ultimately a dangerously cold place in which to live. That is a significant element of the problem.
	Energy suppliers have also been mentioned. Negotiating with energy suppliers cannot be the easiest job in the world, but let us at least give the Government some credit for the fact that they have actually negotiated 800,000 social tariffs for individual customers. That means 800,000 people—double the number since March 2008—have had a social tariff negotiated on their behalf with the energy suppliers. These are voluntary agreements with the energy companies. I have a great deal of sympathy, as in all matters, with my hon. Friend the Member for Chorley, and there is something wonderfully simplistic about the idea of a windfall tax—it worked in 1997, and we saw the benefits of it. I think that everyone would agree, however, that if we could have a voluntary system backed up with the threat of a windfall tax, it would be extremely positive. I agree that the idea of forcing the energy suppliers without some form of sanction is a bit too hopeful, and I would not propose it.
	Let us move on to the decent homes programme. Like every single MP, I have seen the advantages stemming from it. The programme addresses one of the core problems—the condition of our housing stock. Given that our country is relatively old as we had the industrial revolution before anyone else and we had larger cities before most other countries, we suffer from a residue of older housing—badly built, too close together, inadequately ventilated and with an absence of all the facilities we would now expect. The decent homes programme may not be able to create garden cities all over the place from Somerset to Ealing, but it does provide the basic underpinning of a modern home by providing a degree of insulation and energy efficiency. Again, I believe that the Government should be given some credit for introducing it. In addition, the carbon emissions reduction target allows households to access free or discounted insulation and other energy-efficient measures, and 40 per cent. of CERT money is specifically targeted at low-income households.
	The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome is also well aware of the community energy saving programme, which by this autumn will have provided whole-house treatment to more than 90,000 households. The Warm Front scheme has assisted some 2 million households in England. We assisted 270,000 last year.
	The point that I am trying to make is that, although no one could possibly disagree with the hon. Gentleman's intentions, we are already doing the very things that he wants us to do. The Government are acting along precisely the lines that he recommends. We are all travelling in the same direction. We are doing what he says we should do, and we are doing it willingly. We are keen to do it. I am extremely grateful for the assistance and advice that he has provided, but why do we need the Bill to underpin the action already being taken by the Government?
	The hon. Gentleman's answer to that question is "belt and braces", an approach with which I have a degree of sympathy. Trust in any Government does not come naturally to any true democrat. But is it really necessary to have a Bill of this size—and I would not add the word "complexity"; it is not a single-line Bill—when we are already working along precisely the lines that it proposes? I remain to be convinced either way. I have absolutely no intention of trying to obstruct the Bill. I may even have signed the early-day motion; I rather believe that I may have done so. I am in sympathy with the Bill's proposals, but I think that we should ask ourselves a fundamental question: why, when we all agree on the same thing, do we need a separate Bill which could, in fact, slow down the delivery of what we are already undertaking?
	As I said earlier, we use energy inefficiently in this country. We waste heat and power to an alarming extent. It is estimated that the average household in England wastes more than £300 a year simply through living in inefficient buildings and making inefficient use of them. Energy efficiency is a key part of the Bill. What it does not propose, however, is an educative programme to advise and assist people, as the Government are doing but presumably, according to the hon. Gentleman's logic, should be doing more, faster and more accountably. We should be explaining more to people how they can make the most of what they have, and how they can avoid causing problems by using too much power and pumping too much energy into the atmosphere.
	While we know that 47 per cent. of the United Kingdom's carbon dioxide emissions result from heat generation, it is not widely known that, notwithstanding all the discussions that we have about airports and motorways, about a quarter of that is domestically generated. Our target is an 80 per cent. reduction in emissions by 2050. If we are to achieve it, we must virtually eliminate domestic heat waste. I mentioned targets earlier. This is a crucial target. We must direct everything that we are doing in government towards meeting it. As Members know, it is higher than the original target. It was raised so that it would become aspirational, and we all know what dire consequences will follow if we do not achieve it. The Minister has said that achieving it would require an energy revolution, and I do not resile from that, but is such a thing possible?
	A range of actions can be taken. The Warm Front scheme enables 10-year-old boilers to be replaced. District heating is another option. There is an extraordinary scheme in, I believe, Aberdeen, where 4,500 flats and 59 multi-storey blocks now benefit from a district heating scheme. We should be working towards schemes of that kind, but we do not need a new Bill to tell us to do what we are doing already. We do not need new legislation to say that we should be moving in a direction in which we are already moving. We do not need more law when all of us are doing precisely what that law tells us to do. I am not arguing that the Bill is otiose, but I am arguing that it is almost superfluous.
	That brings me to the one thing that the Government are doing that chimes exactly with the hon. Gentleman's ambitions and intentions. I refer to the heat and energy-saving strategy. He will doubtless say that the strategy is not as ambitious and not as tightly timetabled as it should be, and it does not feature the interesting sanction of the Secretary of State voting for my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras from his prison cell. However, the strategy sets out short-term action, plus serious sustainable long-term proposals. It also contains targets, if targets we must have: by 2015 to deliver comprehensive whole house solutions to 400,000 homes a year; by 2020 to save up to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year, equivalent to 33 per cent. of 2006 emissions; by 2020 to have comprehensive whole house solutions for 7 million homes; by 2030, as we arc on through the decades, to make available cost-effective, energy-efficient measures to—there is not a number—all households. As I said earlier, another target is to reduce our emissions by 80 per cent. by 2050 and to move as close as possible to the figure of zero. The heat and energy-saving strategy sets out a long-term vision and constitutes part of the energy revolution that the Minister has referred to.
	We also have consultations on increasing carbon emissions rate targets by 20 per cent. and on the community energy savings programme, which is set out in the short-term plan for households. Most important, we are aiming to have zero carbon for all new non-domestic buildings. That is entirely achievable. We understand that finance is a key issue and the problem was raised earlier about the individual costings of that. I do not want to be seen to be agreeing with almost everything that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome said, but it would be hard not to. The idea that we can save energy, reduce the pain to individual constituents, yet finance new jobs and create the virtuous cycle whereby people get jobs, spend money and the economy grows cannot be anything other than immensely desirable. It is right that he has mentioned that in introducing the Bill.
	Renewable heat is another key issue that has not been mentioned. We are particularly looking at the new renewable heat incentive to encourage more heat to be generated from renewable sources. However, the Government, being the Government, also have to consider the position of industry in the years before the renewable heat incentive comes into force.
	There are parts of the market, however, that require additional attention and support. The Government are proposing stronger incentives to move to a low-carbon future, with which I cannot believe anyone would disagree, and to help people to change their behaviour and to take action. I would like to refer to the home energy audits and the joy of real-time displays. We have heard much about prepayment meters. I sadly come from a generation where tanners and two bobs were kept in cocoa tins on the mantelpiece, the meter would go at some stage and we would then put another two bob piece, or florin, into the meter. It was remarkably useful in many ways because we knew what we were spending; we did not have a bill and we were able to control our expenditure. The slight difficulties were that we paid more than anyone else and any passing ne'er-do-well knew damn well that most of the houses in the part of London where I was brought up had a row of cocoa tins on the mantelpiece stuffed full of two bob bits, which represented a fairly target rich environment, but there is a joy in real-time displays. The industry has responded on the issue of smart meters. It can centrally recalibrate meters, rather than individually calling at every home. Those are positive steps that have been achieved.
	There is the proposal for what I originally read as a meat markets forum—it is in fact a heat markets forum—which includes regulatory arrangements for buying and selling heat. That would protect consumers who buy heat from district heating networks, a matter that has been raised on the Floor of the House many times. The issue of combined heat and power and surplus heat has been mentioned in passing. I think that virtually every major city in this country is now looking at combined heat and power.
	All in all, I feel that the present list of the achievements of this Government should inspire, if not adoration, at least respect. We have recognised the problem, and we have addressed the key issue, and we continue to do so. We have done that through a combination of measures that bite now, in the medium term and the long term, in recognition of the fact that when we are talking about fuel poverty, we are also talking about energy efficiency and all the consequences that were so graphically illustrated in the Stern review.
	We cannot afford not to address this problem on both a micro-level and a macro-level. In his speech, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome spoke with dramatic passion about the individual constituent—whether, for instance, a pensioner or a person with disabilities—shivering and only being able to heat one room. That is the reality on the micro-level, and we cannot ignore it. I respectfully suggest that we are not ignoring it; we are addressing it, and are doing our level best to end the horror of, for instance, a person living in a single room in a two-bedroom house. All of us know of such situations as none of us are unaware of the realities of constituency life, and many of us have actually experienced them. On the macro-level, we clearly cannot continue to consume non-renewable resources and to heat up the planet in the way that we are. I therefore respectfully suggest that we already have a policy, and that it is attainable and costed.
	The hon. Gentleman has done a great service by bringing much more new information before the House. He has had a series of meetings with a great number of actors in this area. In moments of weakness, I sometimes dream about a real Government of all the talents—in which, rather than bringing people in from the City, people are brought in even from the wilder reaches of Somerset, because we clearly need this sort of thinking and we are enjoying the benefits of it in this debate and in the Bill. I am still not entirely convinced that we need a separate Bill, however.
	The hon. Gentleman blended pragmatism with passion in his presentation. He was pragmatic in that he talked about realities; he talked about the reduction from bands B and C to band C, amendments he could accept, and changes that he would be happy to consider if the Bill progressed. Underpinning everything he said, however, is his passion, and I respect and admire that. However, I would try to persuade him that that passion is not unique to the Liberal Democrats, as I think that almost all Members of this House are passionate about wanting to end fuel poverty, and none of us ever wants to have to face situations such as visiting a constituent who is wrapped in blankets and trying to keep warm in front of one bar of the electric fire. We have all had to face such situations, and we all know the realities of that, and none of us wants to see that continue, as it is wrong at every level. I hope that the hon. Gentleman's fury for change and passion for the energy revolution, which the Minister referred to earlier, will energise every one of us and is inherent in the ambitions of us all.
	The hon. Gentleman has distilled much of the thinking on this matter in what is a very good private Member's Bill. I thank him for introducing it, and I hope that by the time this debate finishes—which may not be too far away—I will be convinced of the need to support him. In the meantime, I simply say that his passion, as much as his pragmatism, has won him even more admirers in this House than he had before.

Charles Hendry: In the spirit of cross-party support and encouragement, I am more than happy to recognise the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) in that regard and as a sponsor of the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge) from the other side of the town shakes his head, just in case we confuse him with my hon. Friend, although he has made equally important contributions on other aspects of tackling these issues.
	The Government's figures on fuel poverty only go as far as 2006, and they show that 3.5 million households were in fuel poverty then, compared to 1.8 million in 2005. The estimate is that 5.5 million households, or 9 million people, are now in fuel poverty. There are some 23,000 excess winter deaths, as they are unattractively called, each year as a result of fuel poverty, and the situation is becoming ever more challenging. The annual dual fuel bill is now £1,100, up from £572 in 2003. Every 1 per cent. increase in fuel bills pushes another 40,000 people into fuel poverty. We are all genuinely concerned that the reductions in people's domestic energy bills have not happened anything like as quickly as the increases that we saw a while ago.
	As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome said, fuel poverty occurs across the country, in urban areas as well as rural, and affects the young, the old, single people and families. The issue is not easy to categorise in terms of one particular group, but affects people of all backgrounds in all parts of the country. We must also address the situation of people who are off grid and do not have access to the same support mechanisms and regulation as we see elsewhere.
	It is because of the price increases that we need a swift investigation by the Competition Commission into the relationship between the wholesale price of fuel and what the energy companies charge their customers. We must also recognise that the value of the winter fuel payment has decreased in real terms, while energy prices have risen.
	The hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle), in his impassioned contribution, put much of the blame on the energy companies. I do not agree that this is an opportunity to press the case for a windfall tax. One of the challenges that we face is the real risk that the lights in this country will go out within the decade, and we need to secure massive new investment in our energy plant. A third of the coal-fired stock will be out of commission by 2016 at the latest, and all bar one—Sizewell B —of our nuclear fleet by the early 2020s. If we have a windfall profit tax, the energy companies that we expect to invest in the new stock will simply look elsewhere in the world. The chief executive of E.ON has already made it clear that it does not see the UK as the most attractive place to invest.
	Homes in this country are very poor in terms of energy efficiency. Only 40 per cent. of our homes are properly insulated. The average British home leaks twice as much heat and power as homes in Nordic countries. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome said, there are great opportunities to provide a badly needed economic stimulus at the same time as we make our homes more energy efficient. Figures that have been provided to us show that, when adjusted for climate, we have the second most inefficient homes in Europe. Even when the figures are not adjusted for climate, we are still worse than countries such as Sweden and Germany, which we would not expect.
	We have heard about the role of Warm Front, which has been the Government's chosen vehicle for addressing some of these issues. There is general agreement that it is not delivering as much as it should. To some extent, we can see why. We know in early 2008 the Government cut Warm Front's grant by 25 per cent. That cut was partially reinstated, and £100 million was put back into the budget, but that still results in an overall deficit of £76 million in Warm Front's spending for 2010-11, compared with 2007-08.
	The Government say that the £100 million that they have put back in will mean that an additional 60,000 homes will be brought more up to date in terms of energy efficiency and the installation of modern boilers. Using the same calculation, however, the £76 million still missing from the budget means that the Government are condemning a further 45,000-plus households to fuel poverty.
	Warm Front grants are, as we know, often not sufficient to cover the total cost of insulation. Many of our constituents cannot afford to pay the top-up element that is required and so have to forgo the grant. Concerns have been expressed, too, about the contractors used. Too often, the contractor used is not the cheapest available and national contractors do not give the best possible price. Clear improvements are needed and the Bill represents a genuine effort to achieve them, although I point out that, a few weeks ago, the Conservatives set out some of our thoughts on how to achieve a low-carbon economy, and I believe that our approach is more comprehensive.
	The Bill sets out the need for targets and a delivery plan. All too often, targets are set without a road map—without a delivery plan or solid methods of measuring progress towards the targets. One has to question the value of targets set in that way, so I welcome the fact that the Bill includes a delivery plan. I have a practical concern, however: how can the Secretary of State identify accurately all the houses involved? The challenge is to tackle poor insulation, so that houses have adequate energy conservation, but we have to recognise that residents come and go. Rented accommodation is a particular problem. There is often a significant turnover of tenants, some of whom are fuel poor, some not; none the less, at one moment in time the property will be categorised to determine whether it needs to be upgraded.
	There is an important debate to be had on whose responsibility it is to tackle these issues. There is a clear link between the energy companies and energy efficiency. In a time of a developing energy gap, they have a clear interest and a clear responsibility to help their customers to use less electricity and gas, but the link between the energy companies and fuel poverty is less clear. Those who are fuel poor are often more generally poor. It is the Government who know best who those people are and where they live because the Government have all the relevant information—on income and benefit entitlements, for example—to identify them. There is a case for dealing with the two issues—energy efficiency and fuel poverty—separately.
	Furthermore, although some people are locked into fuel poverty for the longer term, others come into and out of fuel poverty over shorter periods. Take, for example, a pensioner couple whose income from savings has declined dramatically in the past year, while energy prices generally have risen. Although they might not have been in fuel poverty a year ago, they may well be now or in a year's time. Or take a family with two incomes, perhaps not well-paid but not currently in fuel poverty. If one or both partners lose their job, that family could easily fall into fuel poverty by next winter. Or take the situation of someone who has a long-term but not chronic illness. They may be in fuel poverty for a substantial period, but there is every likelihood that it will not be permanent, and that must be our hope.
	The difficulty is that the Bill is aimed a moving target. Our approach is better, I think, because it focuses on poorly insulated houses generally. We would offer every household, whether in fuel poverty or not, an entitlement of up to £6,500-worth of approved energy efficiency improvements. Our figures have been developed in consultation with the best brains in the industry to make sure that they are comprehensive. We think that that is the right way forward because it would enable gas and electricity costs to be reduced immediately, and the costs to be recovered over time by the energy companies, which would have the duty to put the energy conservation measures in place.
	That is the approach taken in the United States, where National Grid is a supplier as well as a distributor of electricity and is legally required to work with consumers to reduce their energy demand. We think that that is a model worth following. I believe that the Minister has been misinformed about our policy and how many homes would be included, but I emphasise that we want it to be rolled out across the entire country.
	The Bill also includes energy assistance packages, which provide that, until their homes have been fuel poverty-proofed, the fuel poor must be offered the lowest tariff available—lower than any other tariff. However, that is hard to define because of the huge range of tariffs offered. One energy provider says it has 700 tariffs because it operates in four parts of the country supplying both gas and electricity and has single and dual tariffs and so on. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome said in introducing his Bill, this can therefore be an extremely complicated issue. Tariffs that might sound cheaper when first offered may end up not being cheaper when one looks at the consumer's actual consumption pattern. They may be using more electricity at peak times simply because they are elderly and are at home when other people are at work.
	There could be a potential conflict of objectives here. One of the reasons why we have supported smart metering so enthusiastically is that it would change people's consumption patterns. They would use less electricity at peak times, which, in turn, would reduce the need for building new generating capacity. They would, for example, be encouraged to put their washing machines and dishwashers on overnight, and would find that a better way of using their electricity. However, the Bill would make it illegal for energy companies to offer to someone who commits to using their washing machine overnight a lower rate than to somebody in fuel poverty who chooses to run theirs during the day.
	The longer-term goal of smart meters is to allow better demand management. People would be offered a better tariff if they allow their electricity supplier to switch off or reduce their power supply to their fridge or lighting at different times of the day when there is peak demand. However, the Bill potentially makes that illegal, because it says that the energy supplier must, at a minimum, offer a customer in fuel poverty a tariff lower than any other tariff available to its other customers. In its current form, the Bill also says that the supplier must not just offer that tariff, but supply it. So in the event that it was offered to somebody but they did not take it up, according to the way in which the Bill is phrased —I hope that we can work out such issues in Committee —it could be illegal if it was not actually supplied at that rate.
	Therefore, what we need is an adaptable system. Tariffs need to adapt to changing circumstances. Somebody on a low wage who happens to lose their job and is therefore at home much more needs to be on a different tariff from the one they were on before. The danger, however, is that the company will have broken the law by not offering a revised tariff, even though it could not reasonably have expected to know that that person's circumstances had changed. Nor do we yet know from the Bill what the penalties will be, although it does give an indication of the level of penalties and what would happen in such a case.
	Again, I believe that our proposed solution is better, because we would require every energy company to offer social tariffs to vulnerable households. That would help to achieve the same objective, but it would not potentially criminalise companies for offering price incentives to customers to use their electricity in an environmentally sound way. We would require energy companies to provide information on their energy bills that clearly showed customers whether they are on the cheapest tariff offered by their company. If they are not, it would show exactly how much they would save if they switched to the cheapest tariff and how they could do so. This approach would be constantly up to date and would reflect consumption patterns. We would also ensure that people's bills show how their household use compares to a similar household in their neighbourhood, so they could make comparisons and informed choices.
	On top of that, we would reform the Post Office card account to enable people to pay their utility bills through direct debit-style payments, cutting the energy bills of up to 4 million people who currently do not have access to a bank account. We would certainly look to introduce smart meters, which in the longer term offer the potential to eliminate completely the charges for prepayment meters.
	In conclusion, we are seeking to improve the Bill as it moves forward. Its aims are good, but it could lead to some less desirable unintended consequences. The thinking behind it has been very positive, and I again pay tribute to those who have encouraged the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome to introduce it. Our approach is I think significantly better, so although we cannot give a ringing endorsement to everything in the Bill at this stage, I hope that we will have the chance to explore these issues further in Committee.

Andrew Dismore: Obviously, I share my hon. Friend's concerns about fuel poverty and I am glad to see him in his place today. I had hoped that these are matters that could be resolved in Committee. However, I put the point to the hon. Gentleman earlier, but he was adamant that he wanted to see the absolute duty in the Bill. Therefore the inference must be that he would not be prepared to make concessions on the matter in Committee.

Andrew Dismore: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I referred to one of the unintended consequences. We could potentially put it right, but he stands by his bull point, which is the duty in clause 2 as currently specified. That is why I must take issue with him.
	We heard earlier about the judicial review in the High Court of the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000. The judge, Mr. Justice McCombe, said:
	"I am quite satisfied that, in this case . . . Parliament would have taken as axiomatic that the pressures on budgets are intense and that government would have to take the necessary steps in the context of other pressing needs for funds. I cannot conceive that Parliament can be taken to have intended that, whatever the expense, so long as not disproportionate to the benefit, the government should be obliged to expend whatever funds might be necessary to eliminate fuel poverty".
	That is a correct interpretation of what Parliament decided when it enacted that Bill. I participated in the debates and supported the Bill, and that interpretation is entirely in keeping with what I thought we were voting for.
	One of the unintended consequences of the absolute duty is this. Let us suppose that the costs involved with the provision escalate dramatically because rising fuel prices mean that more people come within the definition of fuel poverty, because the cost of the work has gone up or because the Government's resources decline. Which hon. Member will want to say that the hospital promised for their constituency should not be built because the Secretary of State has to meet that duty, or that the primary school in their constituency should not get the new boiler that it needs because the priority is ensuring that homes are warm? Which hon. Members would vote for such things, which would be a consequence of the duty as it is phrased in the Bill? Those things would be the consequence, although unintended, of making the duty override all other demands on Government spending. As the Minister said earlier, the previous Bill was phrased precisely to overcome that barrier; furthermore, the judge whom I mentioned interpreted the law accordingly. That was the correct way to approach the issue.
	As I said, my Committee has done a lot of work on social and economic rights and their justiciability. We debated at great length whether there should be social and economic rights in the Bill of Rights proposed as part of our constitution and, if so, the extent to which they should be enforceable through direct justiciability. We came to the conclusion that such enforceability could be extremely dangerous. It is not even required by the UN convention on these matters. That requires the progressive realisation, as resources permit, of all the great objectives of health, education and eliminating poverty; it does not impose absolute duties. The position now adopted by the Government, and which they are at great guns to achieve, matches that duty. The consequence of justiciability is not just that Friends of the Earth can bring a case against the Government, but that any individual or busybody could do so. There is a better approach than through extreme justiciability, and it is the system that we advocated in our report on a UK Bill of Rights and Freedoms; I recommend it to the hon. Gentleman.
	The fact that that approach is better is partly reflected by clause 4, to which I shall come in a minute. We said in the report that the best way was to give the judges an interpretive power, so that they interpreted the common law, Acts of Parliament regulations or whatever in a way that gave maximum effect to the duty. The duty itself would not be directly enforced, but the courts would do their best to give effect to it in how they approached it. That is a halfway house that fits much better within our overall constitutional settlement than what the Bill proposes. There should, of course, also be an absolute bottom line below which nobody should be expected to fall and which the courts could also enforce.
	In the end, clause 2 risks the separation of powers. There is a clear separation of powers—although not as clear as some of us would like—between the legislature, the Executive and the judiciary. The Executive's job is to run the country, the legislature's job is to pass the laws and the judges' job is to interpret them and make sure that the courts are doing their job properly. The problem is that clause 2 would blur the distinctions. Effectively, the judges would be making decisions on the allocation of resources. The judge would decide that the Government had not met the very precise duty under clause 2(1), therefore they must spend more money on it, therefore something else would have to give. Judges have the luxury of not having to say where the money will have to be cut—whether from the housing, schools or health budgets or elsewhere. Judges do not have to make that decision. All the judge has to do is to tell the Government that they are not spending enough money on the target and they have to spend more. The Government do not have that luxury, but the judiciary would have that power as a consequence of clause 2.

John Horam: Is it not the case that any duty that the Government have is restrained, inevitably, by the resources available? As the hon. Gentleman says, it is right that prices will change from time to time and therefore the extent to which any group of people can be taken out of fuel poverty will change from year to year. The Government cannot control that. None the less, the Treasury controls the amount of resources that can be put behind any particular objective. There is presumably a budget and a cap on that budget, and that will constrain what can be done.

Andrew Dismore: The hon. Gentleman is right as far as the law stands. That is exactly what the High Court said in the previous case and I would not object to that. It is a sensible approach to adopt. The Government have a duty to do that, balanced out against all the other obligations and duties that the Government have to meet. That is what the judge said. I cannot conceive that that point could be taken to entail that whatever the expense, so long as it was not disproportionate, the Government should be obliged to expend whatever it takes. I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but the trouble is that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome does not. He says that it has to be an absolute duty. Fuel poverty is an overriding priority and so what the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam) says would not apply if the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome gets his way with the Bill as phrased. That is his bull point—from his point of view, it is the absolute priority of the Bill. That is what I have to take exception to, because I think that it is unrealistic. It is a Trotskyite transitional demand. It is superficially designed to please and to be attractive, but it is not a practical proposition for any Government to accept or, in my view, for any Parliament to pass. The fact remains that it is unrealistic and the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome must accept that.
	We would all love to be able to say that the Government had a duty to ensure that we eliminate entirely illiteracy, waiting lists and people having to hang around in accident and emergency, but that cannot be done in those terms. We can have the aspiration to do so, which is why I agree with clause 1, or the duty to do it, as in the definition set out by Mr. Justice McCombe, which is the right way of setting priorities and the right relationship between the legislature, the Executive and the judiciary. Or we can have it the hon. Gentleman's way, where he does not give a monkey's about health or education so long as he gets his way on this point.
	My bull point of concern—where I really fall out with the hon. Gentleman—is that issue. That is not the end of the Bill, of course. There are other practical problems. We have to achieve this by 2016 in absolute terms, but that might be unrealistic depending on how the world changes. The hon. Gentleman has already conceded that clause 2(3)(a) will have to go. When he drafted the Bill, he did not realise that only 30,000 properties in the whole country would meet that criteria and that the cost of that would be £50 billion plus. Even to do what he is talking about in clause 2(3)(b) at present prices will cost an extra £20 billion on top of the £20 billion we have already spent.
	The hon. Gentleman is on to something with clause 3, which concerns the fuel poverty strategy. I do not disagree that it would be a good idea to set a fuel poverty strategy and for it to deal with all the points to which he refers. It would be helpful to have a strategy set out as a way of benchmarking Government performance. That is one way in which we can do that much more effectively. A benchmarking system whereby we have a strategy that links in to the fuel poverty annual report required by clause 4 would be very effective. I hope that it would mean that every year we would have a debate in Parliament on the strategy and on how far we had got in achieving it, and we could hold the Government to account in the legislature for their performance. That is the right way of holding the Government to account—not in the courts, but by asking the Minister to come to the House, stand at the Dispatch Box and say what they have done or have not done, as well as answering questions and facing challenges from hon. Members on both sides of the House. That is the correct democratic way of dealing with the issue.
	The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to require the fuel poverty strategy to be set out and I do not think that I would take issue with any of the points that he has set out that should be required in the strategy. I particularly agree that it would be useful to include provisions about microgeneration installations. I have no difficulty with that. I do, however, have difficulty with the hon. Gentleman's references to the time scale for the fuel poverty strategy. I do not think that he has considered the correlation between clause 3(1), which sets out a time scale of six months, and clause 9, which deals with consultation. I agree that it is good practice for any Government to consult interested parties and organisations—in this instance, Friends of the Earth, Age Concern and the other organisations that the hon. Gentleman mentioned earlier—and to try to reach agreement with them about what should go into a strategy. However, the Government are always being criticised for having sham consultations, for not allowing enough time for consultations and for not taking into account anything that anyone says. They are criticised for just going through the motions.
	My concern is that the Bill would make it a duty to produce the strategy within six months, because clause 3(1) states:
	"The Secretary of State must, not later than six months...publish a document".
	Bearing in mind the length of time it takes to write Government documents, proof-read them and print them, I am worried that clause 3(1) and clause 9 would be mutually exclusive, in that it would be very difficult to have a proper and effective consultation involving consideration of, and reaching agreement on, all the suggestions, as well as publishing the document, all in the space of six months. That is not realistic. I hope that that matter will be corrected in Committee, but I wanted to draw it to the hon. Gentleman's attention now. I agree with the aims of both clauses, but there is a significant difficulty there.
	Clause 3(5) states that the Secretary of State
	"shall take such steps as are necessary to implement the Fuel Poverty Strategy."
	I shall not repeat my previous argument, but this provision is draconian and probably unachievable in its present form.
	Clause 10 is welcome. It puts pressure on the suppliers to introduce energy assistance packages, and it is quite right that the energy companies should play their full role in helping to deal with the problem. I am worried, however, that the hon. Gentleman seems to want to let them off the hook, because clause 10(3) states that the lower tariffs should be available to customers only
	"until such time as their homes have been made fuel poverty proof."
	Those people are probably on the lower tariff in the first place because they do not have very much money. I would like to see that final provision removed from the clause in Committee, because we ought to be aiming for lower tariffs to be more generally available throughout the fuel companies' charging structures. This picks up on points that were made earlier.
	Clause 12 relates to expenses, and states:
	"There shall be paid out of money provided by Parliament...any expenditure incurred"
	as a consequence of the legislation. As I said earlier, the hon. Gentleman has not put a price tag on this. Indeed, I am not sure that he has one. The best estimate from the Government is that it would cost £20 billion to meet the band C requirement set out in clause 2. This raises the question of whether we would need additional taxation to finance these provisions. I am not sure what £20 billion translates to in terms of income tax, but it could be 4p or 5p in the pound. Or would we need to cut other things in order to pay for this?

Emily Thornberry: May I begin by apologising for not being able to be here earlier today? I had a surgery in my constituency at the Golden Lane campus, a new school that was opened yesterday by Princess Anne.
	Some of the people who came to see me at my surgery wanted to talk about this particularly important issue. I do not know whether one woman who came—she lives at Quaker court—would fall under the definition of being in fuel poverty; certainly, she feels that she does. Hers is a very good example of how complex the fuel poverty issue can be. Her problem is that she is in a three-bedroomed flat in Quaker court, shares a bed with her four-year-old son, has two other sons in another bedroom and a teenager in the third bedroom, and their water-heating system is not big enough for them all to have a shower. She contacted the energy companies and asked for some assistance, and was told that if she wanted to get a new combi boiler, it would cost £3,000. She simply does not have enough money to ensure that she has enough hot water to keep her children clean.
	Of course, an associated problem is that this person's household is simply too large for the flat into which she has been put. As some in the House may know, Quaker court overlooks the site of what used to be a school, but which unfortunately my local authority recently sold off. Instead of its building larger homes for people such as her, there will be yet more student accommodation.
	This person, this victim of fuel poverty, seemed to me a very good example of how the causes of fuel poverty can be very complex and varied. Fuel poverty is an issue of huge importance to my constituents, particularly after the very difficult winter that we have all been through in the south of England. Many of them have
	been contacting me about fuel poverty and—again as a result of the weather—about the huge amount of flooding that has occurred and the dampness of flats.
	All of us agree that people should not continue to suffer from fuel poverty in this day and age. I feel very strongly about this issue. When I was a child, we lived in a very large house. My mother was on benefits and we had a great shed next door where we used to keep our coal—until it ran out. However, we did have 2 ft of coal dust, and my mother used to try to keep the fire going with it. She was always worried that we would run out of coal dust before the winter finished. We used to keep our coats on in the house, and ice used to form on the inside of the windows. In the end, our problem was solved for us: the bailiffs turned up and chucked us out, so we went into social housing—a smaller house that, thankfully, had a better heating system. The issue of children in fuel poverty is one that I feel very strongly about.
	As my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Stephen Pound) pointed out, this debate is about not just fuel poverty, but what we are going to do about it. It is not an issue on which it is of any assistance to any of my constituents for us simply to grandstand. We need to know what it is that we can actually do, and we need to be involved in real politics to make real change for people and to ask what the best ways are of tackling fuel poverty.
	The common way of approaching the problem is to think of the three forces that drive it: low incomes, high prices and poor energy efficiency. The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) talked about social housing as a possible solution to the problem in itself, but I am afraid that my experience shows that that is not necessarily the case. A couple of women came to see me who are in social housing in 67 Graham street—in new build built by the Notting Hill Housing Trust. I wrote to the trust asking why they had such huge bills, and was told that the properties passed the decent homes test and other tests relating to the thermal comfort criteria within the decent homes standard.
	Nevertheless, the women came to speak to me about their huge bills and those of their neighbours. For example, a woman in a one-bedroomed flat is paying £40 a week for her heating. Another woman in a four-bedroomed flat is paying £50 a week for her heating. She says that she has turned off her heating, yet her weekly electricity bill is still £50. People in those flats are switching off their heating so that they are able to pay their electricity bills. The problem with the heating in those flats is that they have what is called a ceiling heater. The heat hits the top of the flats but does not percolate down to the people at the bottom.
	That means that people in that block have bills of, for example, £40 a week, or £50 a week not including the heating. One resident pays £40 to £50 a week and says:
	"We have switched the heating off. We only use the cooker."
	Another, who has a bill of £25 a week for a one-bedroomed flat, says
	"but we're not using the heater."
	Another resident pays £50 a week and says that that does not include heating. In another flat in the same block, the resident pays £40 a week and comments:
	"Can't heat up the flat. Only do it on Saturdays."
	In a one-bedroomed flat where only one heater is on at a time, the weekly electricity bill is £55 a week. In other one-bedroomed flats, people are paying £25 or £30 a week for electricity but, again, that does not include heating. It seems that despite the snow and the temperatures over the past winter, people in an entire block have not been switching on their heating, yet they continue to get huge bills.
	I wholeheartedly support the Bill's definition of fuel poverty, which is:
	"A 'household in fuel poverty' is a household that would need to spend at least 10 per cent of its disposable income on all fuel use in order to achieve a temperature of 21ºC".
	The people in the new build social housing that I have described must spend a great deal more than that, which tends to show that the problem is more complex.

Joan Ruddock: May I explain why I find it difficult to accept that? The opportunity was there in the Bill. We have considered very carefully what the motivation might be behind introducing the Bill. I believe—in fact it has, I think, been confirmed—that it is a response to the recent High Court judgment, which I know is on appeal. The judgment was in favour of the Government on the issue of our fuel poverty strategy. We interpret the Bill—I refer once again to the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon—to mean that in future, no matter what the factors outside the Government's control, the Government would be held to an absolute duty. Taken to its logical conclusion, that suggests that if the matter were tested in court, the expectation is that the Government would be ordered to comply with the duty to the exclusion of everything else.
	In support of what I am saying, may I bring to bear the comments of the Association for the Conservation of Energy? ACE, which I understand is the drafter of the Bill, described the High Court ruling as having made the targets
	"in effect discretionary, not absolute."
	It goes on to say that that was "a bitter blow", and it says that the Bill would
	"reinstate the duty to end fuel poverty."
	That is an absolutist position, and it cannot be acceptable to any Government. Let me be absolutely clear: the current legislation has not been overturned. The strategy remains in place, as do the policies that go with it as well as our commitment to meeting the 2016 target of ending fuel poverty as far as is reasonably practicable.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle) referred to the number of people who have gone out of fuel poverty. Between 1996 and 2004, the number of households in fuel poverty fell from 6.5 million to around 2 million. Those were times of low energy prices, and the figures clearly demonstrate the impact of price factors and rises in income levels over that period. It is worthy of note that if energy prices were to fall back to 2003 levels for a sustained period, the number of fuel poor would be likely to fall below the number recorded in 2003, as a result of the rise in average incomes and in household efficiency since that time. So it is a moving target.
	As I said earlier, the number of households in fuel poverty and the identity of the householder do not remain static. Around two thirds of fuel-poor households are found in the lowest income decile. Research shows that over half of all fuel-poor households contain at least one person over the age of 60, and 40 per cent. of fuel-poor households contain somebody with a long-term illness or disability. As regards the energy efficiency of properties occupied by the fuel poor, 40 per cent. had a standard assessment procedure rating of less than 30, and so were within band F. The average figure in England is 50, which is within band E. Just 1 per cent. of those in fuel poverty lived in a property with a rating of more than 65.
	The latest available figures for the number of those in fuel poverty, which have been quoted today, were for 2006, but we have made estimates for increases since then that suggest that, last year, the figure in England probably went beyond 3.5 million people.
	The Bill takes a radically different approach towards addressing fuel poverty from that of the existing strategy, despite the fact that that strategy was the subject of extensive consultation with the same organisations and non-governmental organisations as those consulted by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, and was probably supported by all those who seek to promote the Bill. Our strategy aims to tackle, as far as reasonably practicable, the three determining factors that contribute to fuel poverty.
	Let me take prices first. As I have said, the Government have little influence over global trends. However, we are tasking Ofgem with providing more advice and action on prices. We know from its first returns that retail costs peaked in December 2008, a few months after the peak in wholesale prices. We have repeatedly called for energy suppliers to pass on the reductions and now all the major household energy suppliers have cut at least some of their tariffs. Ministerial colleagues and I have made it abundantly clear that we believe that more could be done.
	We have also welcomed the Ofgem probe that identified several matters of cause for concern. Such concerns have been frequently highlighted in this Chamber, and they were highlighted passionately today by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). According to Ofgem's analysis, standard credit customers and some high-consumption prepayment meter customers were paying a higher premium in comparison with direct debit customers than could be justified by the cost differential associated with those payment methods. Furthermore, some online direct debit tariffs were at least initially below cost.
	Suppliers have already changed some of their pricing in response to Ofgem's findings and they have responded to pressure from the Government and Ofgem in recent months, with more than £300 million being taken off the premiums paid by customers, including prepayment meter users. They have indicated that further savings of £200 million will be made for those off the gas grid. It is important that consumers can have confidence that pricing will be fair in the future, too. Ofgem has just consulted on a range of potential remedies to ensure that and they include requiring the prices charged for different payment methods to be cost reflective and prohibiting unfair price discrimination or cross-subsidisation between gas and electricity customers. I expect Ofgem to announce the outcome of its consultation shortly as well as to set out how it will take work forward to ensure that customers get a fairer deal.
	We expect suppliers to co-operate with Ofgem and agree to the necessary changes to licences. However, the Government have made it clear that should that agreement not be forthcoming, we will not hesitate to act to ensure that the necessary protections are put in place. The most recent statistics show that in England about 18 per cent. of the fuel poor use prepayment meters for electricity and 12 per cent. use them for gas. As my hon. Friend the Member for Slough told us, some customers on token prepayment meters, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet, can suddenly find themselves in debt after their supplier has backdated price increases when meters are reset or replaced. I would therefore urge suppliers, in the light of their social obligations, to treat those facing payment difficulties as sensitively as possible during the process of replacing token meters. Of course, I am happy to look at my hon. Friend's suggestions.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Chorley described how sharp rises in direct debits are an unwelcome shock to households. These rises can be justified, but suppliers must explain changes clearly and exercise the kind of care that my hon. Friend seeks. I am sure that Members will welcome the fact that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has written to E.ON to ask that vulnerable prepayment customers are not given large backdated bills.
	Ofgem has identified as a key problem the inadequate explanations from suppliers about their rationale for changing direct debits and the methodology for setting them. It is consulting on new rules to enable consumers properly to assess whether new rates are appropriate. We look forward to seeing the results from that consultation. The Bill would not remedy those problems, but we are determined to do so. Unfair pricing must end, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. McGovern) said. It is our intention to take action if Ofgem does not achieve the changes that we believe to be necessary.
	This brings me to the direct financial support that the Government have given to tackle fuel poverty. Since 2000, we have spent more than £20 billion on payments and services. The winter fuel payment was introduced for pensioners in an attempt to help those in fuel poverty and to reassure those who were afraid to turn up their heating in cold weather. Its value has increased from just £20 in 1997-98 to £250 this year for all pensioners, and £400 for the over-80s. There was an interesting exchange between the hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Cox) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North about the value of means-testing and universal benefits. This is a live debate, but, as I have said, the winter fuel payment was introduced not only to tackle fuel poverty but to give reassurance to a wider group of pensioners. Winter fuel bills account for 60 per cent. of the year's total fuel bill, and the payments make a substantial contribution to meeting them.
	Cold weather payments have also featured in the debate. Fortuitously, the payments were increased this year from £8.50 a week to £25 a week. Owing to the winter being excessively cold, we have so far paid an estimated 8.3 million cold weather payments, based on the temperature criterion for Great Britain being met up to 15 March. That is more than 1 million more payments than the previous highest level, and more than the combined total for the past seven years. An estimated £209 million has been paid, which is more than three times the previous highest level, and more than the combined total for the past 15 years. I regret the circumstances described by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough, and I hope that the point she made about her pensioner constituents failing to receive such payments will have been heard by my colleagues at the Department for Work and Pensions.
	I was also asked about weather stations. The scheme links groups of postcode areas to weather stations that report to the Met Office on a daily basis. Each postcode area is assigned to a station with the most similar mean weather temperature. It is not necessarily assigned to the nearest station. I appreciate that some hon. Members might not find that satisfactory, but that is the explanation. We also attempt to provide a further income boost by including benefit checks in some of our specific fuel poverty delivery programmes.
	After prices and incomes, the third, vital factor influencing fuel poverty is, of course, the energy efficiency of homes. That is the basis of the Bill before us today. I acknowledge that the UK's housing stock falls far behind that of most of our continental neighbours, and that all Governments—and, indeed, the building and construction industry, and householders—have been slow to insulate our houses. This is undoubtedly a legacy of earlier cheap energy.
	That is why obligations have been placed on energy companies to deliver energy efficiency measures to households. Building on a previous obligation, we have introduced the carbon emissions reduction target, which runs until 2011. Forty per cent. of that programme of insulation must be directed at a priority group—including the most vulnerable people. Through the CERT, the energy suppliers are required to deliver carbon savings, which are provided through the installation of energy efficiency measures, and we are now consulting on increasing the target for 2008 to 2011 by some 20 per cent. It is estimated that that would drive about £560 million of energy supplier investment into households across Britain, £300 million of which is expected to be in the priority group of households. In total, we expect energy suppliers to need to invest about £1.9 billion in energy efficiency and low-carbon measures into priority group households across Britain between 2008 and 2011.
	Overall, those vulnerable customers are more likely than the average householder to be in danger of falling into fuel poverty, and vulnerability to fuel poverty increases with age. Among householders aged 70 or more who do not claim benefit, the average fuel poverty level is around 50 per cent. higher than in the overall population. That is why we have expanded the priority group to include not just low-income customers, but all elderly customers aged 70 and over.
	Through the CERT, a range of traditional energy efficiency measures are installed, and there is also an incentive to encourage the insulation of more costly measures appropriate for hard-to-treat homes, which was raised by several hon. Members today. We believe that this is an important step, which has already resulted in some 40,000 homes benefiting from solid-wall insulation in the past three years. By 2011, it is estimated that the CERT will have contributed to around 6 million households to realise significant energy bill savings.
	Another area of major activity on energy efficiency, benefiting many poor households, is, of course, the decent homes programme, which has already been referred to in the debate. In the social housing sector, the decent homes programme has helped to transform the standards of many homes; the work completed or planned will have had such an impact by 2010 that we expect 95 per cent. of social housing to have met or exceed the standards set, including the provision of a reasonable degree of thermal comfort.
	When we came to power in 1997, we faced a backlog of repairs with a value of £19 billion. Some 2 million homes were failing to meet the basic decency standards and it is only through the sustained and long-term commitment that we have set out, and our ensuring that it is delivered, that we can hope to transform that vital part of the housing stock. We set a target in 2001 to make all social housing decent by 2010. As I have indicated, more than £29 billion has been invested since 1997 and the number of non-decent social homes has been reduced by more than a million. Between 2001 and 2008, we put in more than 1 million new central heating systems into council homes. From my own constituency experience, I recall that I used to have many people coming to see me year after year to complain that their council houses were bitterly cold in the winter, but, recently, no one has come to see me with that particular complaint.
	A total of more than £40 million will have been invested by the end of 2010 and work will have been completed on 3.6 million homes, with improvements for 8 million people in total, including 2.5 million children. I can thus echo the sentiment expressed by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) about the significant contribution made by council housing to energy efficiency.
	All those are important considerations, but the Warm Front scheme remains the Government's main programme for tackling fuel poverty in the private sector, having developed from the original home energy efficiency scheme. Warm Front has assisted almost 2 million households since its inception in June 2000. Last year alone, we assisted almost 270,000 households, and this included the provision of insulation for more than 58,000 lofts, filling more than 30,000 cavity walls, installing 20,000 new central heating systems and providing 74,000 new boilers. Since 2000, the Government have provided more than £1.8 billion of funding for Warm Front, which is unprecedented in the level of investment and commitment to delivering energy-efficiency measures to vulnerable households.

Joan Ruddock: We are putting £350 million into a new community energy-saving programme. Adjustments are being made. We know that we need to make changes. However, we are making a huge investment.
	Members have raised issues relating to Warm Front, eaga and contracts. We are very alive to the issues that have been raised with us, both today and in letters to the Department and to me. We are examining the existing contract in depth to ensure that it provides value for money and is being run as it should be. Indeed, we are examining all aspects of the Warm Front scheme, because the contract ends in 2010. We want all the benefits that we think we can obtain from the scheme to be in place during the forthcoming financial year, and we want to improve the scheme wherever that is possible.
	In the longer term, we will look at delivery models. We understand the point that has been made on the subject. Companies directly related to eaga were set up at one point because there were problems with finding sufficient installers, and there was a capacity problem. Whether the same model is appropriate for the future is an issue that we are happy to hear debated.
	As we review all aspects of our fuel poverty programme and examine the Warm Front scheme in depth, we are keen to tackle some of the problems that have been raised in relation to targeting, the contributions that people must make, and better technologies. For instance, we are considering the introduction of low-carbon alternative technologies. We are currently in the process of installing 125 solar thermal units to establish whether the fuel savings are as expected, and to assess their suitability for use by vulnerable households. We are also developing a pilot for the inclusion of air source heat pumps to be fitted under the Warm Front scheme.
	As well as providing installations and insulation under the scheme, we carry out benefit checks. Previously such checks were offered only to applicants who were not eligible for a Warm Front grant, but in 2007 we announced that the service would be widened to all Warm Front applicants. That has made a tremendous difference. Since April 2008, over 65,000 benefit entitlement checks have been completed. A new or additional benefit eligibility has been identified in 45 per cent. of cases, which has resulted in an average weekly increase in household income of £31 per applicant, or £1,600 per year.
	The National Audit Office has raised a number of issues, as has the Select Committee, and we are responding to those representations. I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Member for Chorley, for Hendon and for Rossendale and Darwen (Janet Anderson) for raising with me specific cases on behalf of their constituents. I assure them that in-depth consideration is being given to all of them.
	What are we achieving through Government investment and the actions of energy companies? We are making steady progress in improving the energy efficiency of homes, while acknowledging that there is still a long way to go. The question is: does the Bill offer the best way of securing greater progress in the tackling of fuel poverty? It is not obvious that it does. One of the serious matters of debate for all of us who are concerned about fuel poverty is how to target programmes effectively, but the Bill offers no means of targeting households; rather it tackles buildings.

Joan Ruddock: I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I want to get to the crucial part of the debate, which is the issue of whether it is appropriate to put all the targets into the energy efficiency programmes and the particular bands that the Bill provides for. It is a perfectly legitimate approach, but the Government are already considering many more comprehensive programmes of energy efficiency. As it stands, the Bill proposes using standard assessment procedure ratings, and requiring all fuel poor households, except those defined as hard to treat, to be upgraded to a SAP 81 rating by 2016. That ignores the diversity of the UK housing stock, more than 40 per cent. of which has a SAP rating of between 39 and 54, and ignores the diversity of the people in them. Coupled with an absolute duty, that is an extraordinary commitment to seek to bind any Government to.
	Hon. Members seem sometimes to forget that there are only two ways of providing finance for such programmes. Either the obligation falls on the energy companies and they recoup the costs by loading them on to everyone else's bills, or the obligation falls on the taxpayer. While the principles behind the Bill—improving energy efficiency in a bid to prevent fuel poverty—are sound, the targets are uncosted, unrealistic and not thought through.
	The Bill proposes that existing homes with fuel-poor inhabitants should be upgraded to a SAP 81 rating—that is, a band B grade—or a band C rating if they are hard-to-treat homes. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome has said, he is prepared to reduce that level, but it is currently estimated that only 1 million-odd homes in Britain today have been brought to the band C standard. Indeed only 30,000 properties in England are at the band B standard. The average SAP rating of all homes is only 50 at the moment. Therefore, even with the proposals that he might make, we think that this is an unrealistic target.

Peter Viggers: I am grateful for this opportunity to raise in the House the issue of the Royal Hospital Haslar. It has been raised before. I have maintained to colleagues that it is the best-known hospital in the House of Commons, and the file on the subject is 1 ft high.
	The Haslar site was bought in 1745. It is a glorious 55-acre site overlooking the mouth of Portsmouth harbour, and it became the first purpose-built hospital for the Royal Navy. It was opened in 1754 and took some 1,800 patients. Its distinctive high walls were there to prevent the patients from escaping should they wish to do so, having been press-ganged into the Navy initially. It is historically very interesting. The expression "up the creek" refers to Haslar creek, which is not a good place to be. It was for years the main home of the Royal Naval Medical Service, but following changes it eventually became the only military hospital in the United Kingdom, and was renamed the Royal Hospital Haslar. That was the position on 10 December 1998. On that date, the Government announced they were proposing that the military forces withdraw from Haslar, and it was stated that the hospital would close in about two years. In fact, some 10 years later the Royal Hospital Haslar is still there.
	The decision at the time caused anger, distress and even outrage. A march in January 1999 was attended by 22,000 people, which was thought to be the largest number of people ever to protest about the closure of a hospital. We had every kind of demonstration. We had Save Haslar—hundreds of people holding torches pointing upwards, which was broadcast live on television. We also had every kind of rally and petition. Local feeling was extremely strong; there was a church vigil, I remember.
	The concern was over two issues: the military aspect and the civilian aspect. In respect of the military aspect, the hospital was the home of the Defence Medical Services, and it was losing its home. The proposal was to build a new £200-million facility at Selly Oak in Birmingham, but that was scrapped for budget reasons. For many years, there had been shortfalls in the armed forces in a number of faculties, including general medicine, general surgery, orthopaedic surgery and anaesthetics. There has for many years been a problem in the medical forces, not so much with recruitment, because the armed forces pay for the training of young doctors and nurses, but with retention, which remains extremely poor. Were it not for the reserves, it would not be possible for the armed forces to have the medical back-up they so badly need.
	The situation remains unresolved. There is a proposal to move some facilities to Lichfield, which is not convenient—to park the other facilities the other side of Birmingham. We maintain that the facilities at Fort Blockhouse should remain. The Ministry of Defence hospital units where military personnel work alongside civilians have much to say for them, because they give the military experience across a wide range of medicine and surgery. However, there is a problem, because the military personnel work alongside civilians, who, in many cases, earn more than they do and do not have to go to Afghanistan from time to time. That does not help the retention of personnel in the armed forces medical services.
	I come to the civilian aspects of the loss of Haslar. We did warn, in what, I thought, were dramatic terms, that lives would be lost in the ambulance between Gosport and the Queen Alexandra hospital in Cosham as a result of the closure of the accident and emergency unit at Haslar, but what we did not know was that one of the first lives to be lost would be that of the local mayor. The situation is tragic, because there is a trade-off between the sophistication of the medical services and the speed of treatment. Although survey after survey shows that medical staff favour larger, sophisticated hospitals, survey after survey also shows that patients prefer to be treated fairly close to them, in their local facilities.
	The affection for Haslar is not simply nostalgia; it is firmly rooted in decades of excellent surgery and medicine provided locally in a spotlessly clean and smart environment. There is little or no affection for the huge Queen Alexandra hospital in Cosham, which is inconvenient, from a transport point of view, for my constituents and has been built at a private finance initiative cost, over 30 years, of £1 billion. The journey to it is difficult and the hospital has inadequate car parking facilities. I know and respect the staff at Queen Alexandra hospital, but there is a long way to go before they have one fraction of the affection that Haslar hospital has in people's minds.
	The 10-year battle for the retention of Haslar is still not over, although, in theory, the hospital will close in July 2009. There are huge planning problems in relation to the development of Haslar: it has 815,000 sq ft of buildings, 13 of which are grade II or grade II* listed; there are 60,000 graves on the site; the whole of the park and gardens has been identified by English Heritage as a site of national historical interest; and the local authority, Gosport borough council, has designated the area for health and community use.
	Where do we go from here? The plan is to move on, and Defence Estates has commissioned the Prince's Regeneration Trust to carry out an inquiry by design report. Perhaps the best way for me to proceed is by reading a letter that I received recently from the private secretary to the Prince of Wales. It stated:
	"The approach we are taking is for the Enquiry by Design report to be included in the marketing pack for the site so that developers can see and appreciate the site's potential and His Royal Highness' involvement."
	The Prince's Regeneration Trust report is, indeed, an extremely useful starting point, which goes into great detail. Most local people feel that it is an extremely helpful starting point when considering what should happen to the site.
	The good news is that very many people and institutions wish to be involved in the Haslar site, including a business syndicate that I have met, which is a leading developer with a fine record of making use of historical buildings, other companies with health-related interests, and a number of service charities, including Help for Heroes and the Royal Naval Benevolent Trust. Many people feel that the site can usefully be used to continue the armed forces' existing role.
	I know the way in which government works: when a decision has been taken, people cannot turn it round, because the Government have made a decision and do not wish to go back on it. If one tries to say, as I tried to say to the Minister's ministerial colleague two days ago, when he was good enough to see me at the Ministry of Defence, that there is a future role for Haslar in an armed forces connection, people's eyes glaze over, because, as the French would say, it is a route barrée—one does not go that way.
	I believe that if sufficient support can come forward for the evolution and development of Haslar, in due course the armed forces, having made their decision to close Haslar, will see that there are facilities there that are useful to them. Many of those connected with the service charities believe that too. There is a need for facilities for the armed forces to supplement those at Selly Oak, which are now widely regarded as excellent in their field, and the outstanding facilities at Headley court. There is an acceptance that post-traumatic stress disorder is manifested some 15 years after the event, and those suffering from it need further support in a services environment. There is also a need for convalescent and rehabilitation facilities to lie alongside those at Selly Oak and Headley court. Haslar could play a role in such provision.
	My plea to the Minister today is to respect the traditions of Haslar and take a positive attitude to its continued use by encouraging local authorities and the Prince's Regeneration Trust to continue their work to find a role for Haslar, and not to allow it to close in July. If we work hard together, we could bring forward plans that would allow the gates to remain open after that date.
	There is a sort of precedent. When Greenwich hospital became surplus to requirements, the proposal was that it should be sold and it was intended that very few restrictions would be put on its future use. The issue was put to the Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill, which I happened to chair, and we consulted local people—we visited Greenwich and took evidence from them—and service personnel who took the view that the future use of Greenwich should be consistent with its traditions and historical record. The Committee passed that into legislation and that is why Greenwich is now used by Westminster university for purposes consistent with its historical tradition. It would be the right approach for Haslar to be treated similarly.
	The best way to steer through the difficult planning problems—because the site is not a push-over for a developer, and it will be very difficult to extract development value from it—will be co-operation, and I ask for the Minister's good will. When Defence Estates has property surplus to its requirements, the rule is that it must seek to obtain the best price for it on behalf of the taxpayer. That is a reasonable view in most circumstances. However, special provisions must apply in the case of Haslar. Until recently, the MOD owned about one third of my constituency, and has only recently begun to dispose of land in the area. It is still a very large landowner there. My constituents feel strongly—I share their view—that when the MOD has had such a big footprint in an area, it owes that area a special responsibility when it disposes of the site. Indeed, the Minister will know that payment was made so that the Chatham dockyard could continue as a legacy site, and I maintain that the same situation applies at Haslar.
	The only way round the best price rule is if a government body, such as a local authority, steps in and offers to take over the site and be responsible for it. If local authorities were to recognise the unique opportunity of the site as well as its needs, and step in this point—with the good will of Government—and bring to the table those who wish to use and operate the site, that would be a solution that would be welcomed by all. I look forward to hearing the Minister's response.